Duffy Lab Welcomes Dr. Sophie Dupont

Duffy Lab Welcomes Dr. Sophie Dupont

Published: Monday, February 6, 2023

Please welcome Dr. Sophie Dupont to the Whitney Laboratory! Dr. Dupont is a visiting researcher in the Duffy Lab and will be training in the viral detection and quantification lab techniques developed at the Whitney Lab.

She is a french researcher concerned about the human print on neighboring vertebrates. After obtaining her MSc Degree in Conservation Biology from Paris-Saclay University, she achieved a Ph.D. at the Centre d'Etudes Biologiques de Chizé (France), focusing on the impact of developmental conditions at both early and adult stages in bird species.

Since September 2019, she's been involved in post-doctoral research projects that aim to combine multidisciplinary approaches to understand how vertebrates are affected by anthropic activities and associated stress. In November 2022, she started a post-doctoral position, co-supervised by Dr. Damien Chevallier and Dr. Mathieu Giraudeau and in collaboration with Dr. Jérôme Fort, Prof Paco Bustamante, and Dr. Guillaume Le Loc’h. The objective of her post-doctoral position is to evaluate the impact of pollutants on Fibropapillomatosis prevalence and viral activity in immature Green turtles from Martinique island. To do so, she's combining ecotoxicological, physiological, clinical, and virological approaches, to study the association between green turtle ecotoxicological and FP features (lesion characteristics and ChHV5 presence notably). By taking advantage of the high-site fidelity observed in this species and the long-term monitoring program conducted since 2007 at Martinique Island, she will conduct a promising longitudinal study on the effect of pollutants both at the tumor and turtle scales.